News Inventory

Good physicians know the bad ones in their midst. Why don't they point fingers? Look the Other Way Robert Whitney of Attleboro, Massachusetts, suffered persistent and crippling stomach pain until his problem was finally diagnosed: During a hernia operation four years earlier, surgical mesh had been mistakenly attached to his bladder. The surgeon, Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez, was dunned $652,000 for that bit of malpractice, disciplined by his hospital and investigated by the state over the quality of care provided to seven other patients, two ... Read More

Researchers Find Gene That Affects How Kidneys Process Salt A gene that affects how the kidneys process salt may help determine a person's risk of high blood pressure, a discovery that could lead to better ways to treat the condition, researchers said on Monday. People with a common variant of the gene STK39 tend to have higher blood pressure levels and are more likely to develop full-blown high blood pressure, also called hypertension, University of Maryland School of Medicine researchers found. They identified the gene's ... Read More

The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system that spends most of its time in thermal equilibrium. You can get a universe like ours that way, but you’re overwhelmingly more likely to get just a single galaxy, or a single planet, or even just a single brain — so the statistical-fluctuation idea seems to be ... Read More

THE baby is just one day old and has not yet left hospital. She is quiet but alert. Twenty centimetres from her face researchers have placed a white card with two black spots on it. She stares at it intently. A researcher removes the card and replaces it by another, this time with the spots differently spaced. As the cards alternate, her gaze starts to wander—until a third, with three black spots, is presented. Her gaze returns: she looks at it for ... Read More

A defining moment of the cold war came in 1955 when Moscow detonated its first hydrogen bomb — a weapon roughly a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs and ideal for obliterating large cities. The bomb ended the American monopoly and posed a lethal danger. So Washington dealt far more gingerly with Moscow, beginning a tense era dominated by fear of mutual annihilation. Now, a new book says Moscow acquired the secret of the hydrogen bomb not from its own scientists but from ... Read More